Save the Oceans Stop recycling plastic - Executive summary

Save the Oceans Stop recycling plastic by Dr.Mikko Punio is published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation and can be read in its entirety on the GWPF website. (See below)

A marine plastic litter crisis has been declared and the mass media around the world has given their front pages over to the story for a while now. The European Union – among other actors – has declared a war against marine litter. Annually over 10 million metric tons (Mt) of plastic litter end up in oceans, harming wildlife.

The International Solid Waste Association (ISWA) – the most competent specialist organization in the field – has summarized the origins of the marine litter crisis: 75% of land based marine litter in low to upper-middle income economies comes from litter and uncollected waste, while the remaining 25% of the land-based sources is plastic which leaks from within the waste management system.

In other words, the ISWA report shows that 25% of the leakage is attributable to the waste management option preferred by green ideologues; meanwhile, waste incineration can prevent any leakage of plastic if municipal solid waste (MSW) is incinerated along with sewage sludge. Despite this, incineration is vehemently opposed by green ideologues and also by the EU, which chooses to believe in the mirage of a circular economy.

The vast majority of the marine litter problem is attributable to poor waste collection and other sanitary practices in Asian, and to a lesser extent African, towns and cities in coastal areas and along rivers. The problem is particularly acute in China. The neglect of urban sanitary policy – the backbone of development agendas until that time – started when the 'mother of sustainability', Norway's Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, personally refused to have

it be part of her World Commission's work program and ultimately its 1987 report, which famously led to the adoption of 'sustainable development' goals by the UN General Assembly.

This report describes the absurdities, inefficiencies, double or even triple waste management structures and horrible consequences of the EU's erratic green waste policy (such as the terrible waste catastrophe in Naples in 2008), its fact-free claim that its waste policy helps to implement the Paris climate agreement, and its dumping of 3 Mt of plastic in China each year, with horrific consequences for the marine environment and health.

The EU has now started to sideline – in the name of circular economy – the highly successful waste incineration policy implemented in seven EU member states – Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden – which all have major waste incineration capacity and now landfill less than 3% of their MSW.

About the author

As an undergraduate at Oxford, Ariane Loening was old enough to vote NO in the 1975 EEC referendum.She gained experience of UN agencies and spent the 1980s in West Bengal working in the voluntary sector at grassroots level, developing a forensic approach to socio-political and economic issues before returning to Scotland in 1993. She values, in particular, knowledge of historical background, believing it to be the best way to understand the present.